They faced each other for the first time in the great atrium of the house, beneath a canopy made of Benjamin HaLevy’s prayer shawl and held aloft by HaLevy himself, his manservant, and two men mustered from the stables. The magistrate had been summoned to preside, though he spent most of the ceremony glancing anxiously back through a window toward the smoke slowly rolling from London. The ceremony was pronounced in Hebrew by a Jew even older than the master of the house, an ancient Italian, the sole learned Jew Benjamin HaLevy had been able to procure on short notice—for the letter announcing Alvaro HaLevy’s return had been delayed. In the end, the paper bearing the disembarkation date reached the doorstep only hours before the son himself: a lithe, nearly unrecognizable man with unruly dark curls, a weather-beaten face with a scar at the chin, a sun-kissed brow from his service aboard merchant vessels in far reaches of the sea, and fine lines of sorrow at the corners of his eyes.
A rim of fire stood on the dull horizon. Black smoke drifted amid the mossy trees beyond the windows, and the tinge of fire entered through the cracks of the closed windows. Any chink in the house, any door or window swung open for even a moment, seemed to admit ash, so that Ester’s cream-colored dress was grayed by the time she finished making the seven circles around Alvaro HaLevy and stood opposite him beneath the canopy. She could feel the silt in her own hair—but it was the ash on Alvaro HaLevy’s head that sowed the first bubble of laughter in her. Beneath his ash-grayed curls, his face took on a strange gravity, and it was a simple matter to imagine him in his dotage: the aged master of this manor . . . with his devoted wife by his side? A joke to crown all jokes. The bubble rose in her chest, in her throat. She fought to quell it. Beneath the wedding canopy, Alvaro HaLevy was gazing at her with an uncomfortable, apologetic solemnity, which—to his own evident shock—cracked. Their laughter, escaping their closed lips, twice interrupted the old Jew from his recitation of the necessary words. Benjamin HaLevy shut his eyes as though in pain and did not open them until he had a daughter-in-law.
At last the old Jew closed his prayer book and coughed his disapproval in the thick air; the magistrate peered yet again out the window and then with an impatient gesture dipped quill in ink, and had Benjamin HaLevy spell for him the names of the groom and bride. Rivka, who’d stood shadowed at the side of the hall with a curious expression, as though she were watching the doings of animals in some exotic menagerie, now seemed to wake to something familiar. Swiftly she gestured Ester toward her new father-in-law. With a last glance to Alvaro, with his ashy hair and his eyes shining from their laughter, Ester formed her face into a more solemn expression and stepped toward Benjamin HaLevy. Was she to kiss him on his withered cheek? She did it, a quick deed with dry lips, and he appeared shocked, then grateful.
Only then did she glance down at the page where the magistrate had entered the marriage in the register—but where Alvaro’s name should have been, the father had given the name Manuel HaLevy.
Benjamin HaLevy followed her gaze. Then his eyes rose to hers—a long stare that aimed for defiance but fell short; and she saw that the fire inside him had died with his elder son, and that he himself would soon follow.
“It should have been,” he said, in a voice so quiet she almost pitied him.
She turned her body so that Alvaro wouldn’t see the page on which his name had not been inked, and stepped back toward him. He smiled at her, hesitant again. More than a year at sea had trained the clumsiness out of him, but he still had the liquid gaze of a boy. How ancient she felt in comparison.
The thought must have flickered on her face, because Alvaro tilted his head. “You’re not troubled by our arrangement?” he said.
She shook her head, incredulous.
“Is it him?” he whispered, indicating his father. His face tightened; the shadow of his long anguish passed over him. He did not attempt to hide it. But there was something else in him, too—she saw it—something that had formed in him during his exile, shaped out of the terror and wonder of his new life, nights watching the brave emptiness of the sea. “All the same,” he said, “I think we can weather him. I’ll help you if I can.” He hesitated. “But there’s something else troubling you. I see it.”
How could one answer such a man, who said what he saw and didn’t pretend the world was other than it was? She couldn’t work out whether Alvaro was foolish or wise; whether she despised his innocence or admired it; whether she thought him the most soft-minded boy, or whether he’d grown into something different and altogether alien—a man unlike any she’d encountered. But at that moment she decided she would be as truthful with him as he was with her. “You,” she said. And seeing her stern perplexity, he laughed.
Together they turned to Benjamin HaLevy: husband and wife. With a small sniff, HaLevy led the way to the meal he’d had the cooks prepare. It was a shadow of a real wedding feast, their forks clinking in the cavernous dining room, the magistrate working away dutifully at his plate, and only the old Italian Jew eating with zeal, consuming a startling quantity of food and drink. Benjamin HaLevy, for his part, set down his fork midway through the meal and stared at Ester, as though for a moment regretting the bargain he’d struck: that while he lived, he’d be seen after by a son and a daughter-in-law. She’d promised no heir to inherit the grand HaLevy house—she’d made clear that point. But there would be no shame on the HaLevy name while the old man lived. And he would die accompanied by kin, not only servants.
So he had. That winter following the marriage, the life had drained from the old man like water from a fissured vessel. He’d wanted death, Ester had known it, but now it came too fast, and daily she saw the dread on his face. One morning, finding him stilled beside the window at the turn of the grand stair, as though its vista of budding trees barred him from proceeding down to his meal, she’d said to him, “Death tarries and tarries, then speeds when we’d beg just another hour.” And he’d turned his baleful wintry face on her as though he reviled her—then, something giving within him, nodded.
She read to him on his sickbed those final weeks from the only book he would hear—Usque’s Consola??o às Tribula??es de Israel—its pages bright by the light of a fire he gazed at with a feverish hunger. “Choradas que auemos jaa estas chagas . . . tempo he que busquemos o remedio e consolo pera todas ellos pois somos aquí vinos a ese fim o qual . . .” She could not forgive the man, but she herself had been nursed back to health by Rivka when Rivka had reason to spurn her, and she knew now what it was to be tended by patient hands. She turned his bony body in bed when he could not turn himself, she moistened his lips with a wet cloth when he could not drink. She read to him, in a steady voice, words she did not believe. And on the day when she came to his rooms and found him staring mute at the frost on the panes of the window above his bed, tears threading slowly along the wrinkles on his pale cheeks, she summoned his son. Alvaro, who could no more withhold love than he could resist taking in each next breath, forgave his father in a rush of words the old man could only bat away with a circling, trembling hand—a veined, papery hand that pushed away and beckoned, pushed away and beckoned.
Alvaro stood over his father’s bedside as the hand turned feeble and subsided.
So the house fell silent with mourning, and in that hush Alvaro at length turned from his father’s deathbed, his face wet with tears he didn’t bother to wipe away before the servants, his footsteps sounding thin on the polished floor as he passed from his father’s bedchamber through the quiet rooms and halls of the great house, and became its master.
A knocking, a vibrating blue. Tears on her own cheeks.
The bird. She was crying because of a knocking bird. And a sky. And a feathery softness the bird and the sky made together in her chest—as if she might, with an effort no more arduous than a sigh, rise and reshape herself into something altogether new. Hadn’t Rivka said as much this morning? She’d paused at the door, holding a stack of pressed and folded linens against her ample waist, and chided Ester. “You’re not old enough to huddle here in the dark.” Irritably, Ester had gestured in explanation at the thick book before her—though in truth, she’d been struggling to keep her mind on it. But Rivka continued. “London is past. You bargained for a different life. Why don’t you live it?”